Not bad...

Rating: 7/10 (15 April 2008)

It should be noted that 28 Days Later is not a horror film, it's a pretty clear cut science fiction film, with some horror elements. The movie starts with a half-witted premise, a bunch of animal rights activists break into a lab and release some monkeys, on which apparently horrible tests are being conducted. What they don't realize, and don't allow one desperate scientist to explain, is that the monkeys are infected with "Rage," which turns out to be an astonishing disease. The minute the first monkey is free, it screams and spits and bites the first person it comes into contact with, causing her to seemingly start to spit out her insides.
Sounds pleasing, right? The infections scenes are done really well, it's the implication that this is going to turn into a zombie movie that may cause the eyes to glaze over. But the 28 days in the title refers to when the movie takes place. It seems that a London bicycle courier named Jim (played effectively by Cillian Murphy) has suffered a near fatal traffic accident and woke up in the hospital, 28 days after the accidental release of the rage virus. The London that he finds as he wanders out of the empty hospital is, of course, very different from the one that he left.
This is one of those movies that was wisely shot on a different medium than is generally used for modern films. Director Danny Boyle opted to shoot the movie on digital video rather than film, which not only made the film much more affordable (a huge budget, after all, could very well have ruined it), but also gave the movie that gritty, realistic feel that movies like this should have.
There are standard rules applied to the infection, such as that if someone becomes infected you have about 20 seconds to kill them before they kill you. Basically, the virus created was meant to be sort of a counteractive drug to combat rage. The ultimate anger management, if you will. But unfortunately, in order to fight rage, the scientists had to create pure rage in their test subjects, the monkeys, and then try to fight it. Unfortunately, rather than reducing pure, unfiltered anger, they turned it into an infectious disease. Oops.
Before long, Jim is traveling with Selina, a hardened survivor who has learned to detach all emotional connections with other people in case she suddenly finds herself faced with the decision to die or kill someone close to her in less than 20 seconds. They meet up with a big tender man named Frank and his daughter, holed up in a high-rise apartment building, and ultimately the four of them decide to try to drive in Frank's London taxi cab toward what a mysterious broadcast on the radio claims is a safe zone.
Obviously, there's no way of knowing whether the message is reliable or not (and yes, the mysterious broadcast is one of the most routine, redundant plot devices in the movie, which is a big statement, given that post-apocalyptic zombie movies tend to generally be driven by routine, redundant plot devices), but they take the risk. Life in a high rise apartment building may get real old real quick.
What follows is probably the dumbest scene in the entire movie, where the car careens effortlessly over a jam of gridlocked cars in a tunnel. The scene is so improbable and so incongruous to the relative realism (so to speak) of the rest of the movie that I can only guess that it's some kind of in joke which only Londoners, and maybe even only London taxi drivers, would know or understand.
Then come the plot holes.
When Jim first walked out of that hospital, he found London totally deserted. There was NO ONE in the city. You may find yourself overwhelmed by the astonishing sight of London really deserted (they really cleared the streets for those shots), which may lead you to forget that, since no one is around, presumably everyone who was infected is not only dead, but their scattered carcasses have been cleaned up by someone. Once infected, how long can the host expect to live? 20 minutes? A day? A month? Or maybe they just went into hiding like in I Am Legend. Attributing an intolerance of daylight would not be the only zombie or vampire-like quality attributed to those infected with rage in this movie.
In the political and military climate into which the movie was released, it makes a strong comment on the possibility and danger of biological warfare, so much so that it may even seem to be cashing in on this fear. But not only does it call our attention to this possibility, even more than it might already have been there, it also forces us to consider what the world would be like after such an attack. I doubt it would be much like it is in the movie, but I also have a feeling that most people imagine what such an attack would look like, rather than what it would look like 28 days later.